Recording your practicing

ByBret Pimentel

“Record yourself when you practice” is common advice, and good advice. I frequently recommend it to my students, but few of them do it. I think it can seem overwhelming. Recording seems like a big production: getting the material to performance level, using complicated and expensive equipment, playing beginning to end, doing cruelly thorough analysis followed by self-flagellation and sadness.

Here’s a simple, effective, low-stress approach that I use:

  1. Pick some practice material that needs improvement. It can be at any level, from sightreading to almost-perfect.
  2. Bring up the voice memo app on your smartphone, or something like Audacity (free) on your computer. (You can use fancier equipment if you want, but you will do this process more often if you make it easy.)
  3. Start recording. Play as much or as little as you like. (A few minutes’ worth is usually my maximum, unless I’m almost ready to perform.) If you make a mistake or have to stop, recover and continue.
  4. Listen to the recording. As you do, write down things that you hear, both positive and negative. These could be big or small things, like “wrong note at measure 4,” “tone is dull,” “nice smooth phrases,” etc. You don’t have to catch everything. Just note the things that jump out at you.
  5. Look over your list and pick no more than three things to work on. (I try to pick the things that I think will lead to the greatest overall improvement in how I sound. But if you’re not sure, just pick some.)
  6. Practice for a while, focusing on the things you wanted to improve.
  7. Return to step 3.

The benefits of recording your practicing include:

  • A more accurate idea of how you sound at this moment.
  • Development of your ears, so that you hear yourself more accurately while you are playing. (Less shock when you hear recordings of yourself.)
  • Focused, results-driven practice sessions.
  • Increased comfort level with playing under pressure.
  • Better awareness of your progress (or a tough but necessary realization that you have plateaued—time to rethink your practice techniques!).

Give it a try!

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    I think many aspiring musicians pass through a phase in their development where they have “learned” fingerings, music reading skills, and other fundamentals at a basic degree of mastery, and turn their attention to developing sufficiently fluent technique (mostly finger technique) to tackle the instrument’s standard literature. Once they acquire that fluency and tackle that repertoire, they will begin to deal with the nuances of interpretation.

    Whether this is the best way to do things is a subject for another post (or book), but the reality is that a lot of advancing music students, including many of my university students, are at a point where they are very focused on playing notes in time in tempo, and when they achieve that level with an étude or repertoire piece, sometimes they don’t have a clear idea of what else needs to be done to bring the assignment to a performance level.

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    If you or your students find yourself in that holding pattern, here are just a few ideas of what to “add” to your technical preparation:

    • Are you following all the composer’s marked articulations? dynamics? tempo changes?
    • In the places between the dynamic markings, are you giving the phrases appropriate shaping?
    • Is each note in tune? Does each note have a characteristic, pleasing, and consistent tone? Does each note respond precisely when and how you intend it to?
    • Have you familiarized yourself with all of the composer’s textual indications, and translated them if necessary? Are you making them audible?
    • Are you using vibrato (if applicable) in a purposeful and expressive way?
    • Are you taking a purposeful approach to performance practice? For example, are you using historically-informed approaches to ornamentation, dynamics, tempo, articulation, etc.? Or, alternatively, have you made a conscious and well-informed decision to break from these?
    • Have you studied live performances and recordings of this work by the finest musicians, compared their interpretations, and made careful choices about which ideas to incorporate or adapt into your own performance?
    • Have you thoroughly studied the full score, and do you understand how your part fits into the whole?
    • Do you have opinions about the formal structure, and are you using those to shape your overall interpretation?

    Those are just a few, but probably enough to keep most of us busy for a lifetime of study. Feel free to add some more in the comments.

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  • Did I play that “right?”

    ByBret Pimentel

    Sometimes my beginner students will play something for me, then ask, “Was that right?” What they generally seem to mean is something like, “Did I use the correct fingerings in the correct order?” A student who is slightly more advanced might ask the same question, but also wonder whether the rhythms were “correct.” A student farther along than that might take into consideration things like accurate observance of marked articulations and dynamics.

    Setting aside creative concerns and looking only at technical matters, when is a student’s playing “right?”

    I try to impress upon my advancing students that execution of musical passages isn’t really about “right” or “wrong,” but rather about degrees of rightness. To borrow an idea from manufacturing or engineering, we might think in terms of tolerances.

    In other words, for a beginner, a half-note rhythm might be “right” if the half notes are roughly twice the length of quarter notes, and a pitch of “D” might be “right” if it is closer to D than it is to D-flat or D-sharp. For a somewhat more advanced student, it might not be “right” until the rhythms can be played without wandering too far afield of a metronome and the pitches trigger the “in tune” light on a cheap electric tuner. For an even more advanced student, those tolerances wouldn’t be fine enough—we might expect the rhythmic ratios to be accurate to within a few percent, and the pitches to be accurate within so many cents.

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    photo, Lewis Meyer

    At the highest levels of musical technique, we question what tolerances are accurate enough for our audiences, or for someone with even more finely-tuned ears—a conductor, perhaps, or an audition panel, or collaborating musicians, or a record producer. Are my rhythms “right” when they are within a tolerance of a hundredth of a second? A thousandth? A ten-thousandth? Who will hear the difference if my pitches are within a tolerance of ten cents? Five cents? The more I think about it, the more I’m certain I can never really be satisfied, because as my execution gets more accurate, my ears get less tolerant.

    If your ears are currently “tolerating” your level of accuracy when you play, it may be time to listen more closely and critically. Don’t be satisfied with “right”—go for more right.

  • Memorization and practicing

    ByBret Pimentel

    I think memorization is a useful practice technique, even if you don’t intend to perform “from memory.” Memorization of music has several facets:

    • Aural memory: I should be able to sing the music (at least in my mind) from beginning to end with confidence and accuracy.
    • Content/visual/analytical memory: I should be able to more or less transcribe or describe the music from memory. This might include being able to picture the printed music, being able to describe it in reasonably specific terms (“then there’s a fast run up a C minor scale, ending on a long high F with a fermata”), and/or being able to discuss the formal and phrase structures. (I don’t think you necessarily need to be able to think in terms of formal classical music theory, as long as you have some kind of vocabulary for talking about music.)
    • Physical/muscle memory: If I have practiced in a thorough, detailed way, I should be able to more or less play on “autopilot.” I don’t want to perform in a disengaged way, but I do want to be able to focus my mind on non-technical things.
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    Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet (L to R: Cornelius Boots, Jonathan Russell, Aaron Novik, Jeff Anderle). Photo, Rick Shinozaki

    The benefits of memorization, even for not-strictly-from-memory performance, include:

    • Confidence born from deep mastery of the music.
    • The ability to handle minor on-stage crises, like a missed page turn or a sudden distraction, with ease and grace.
    • Internalization of the music in such a way that interpretation becomes natural, expressive, and personal.
    • Freedom from “reading” issues. Sometimes musical passages are made difficult by visual factors, like hard-to-read notation, a personal reading difficulty (such as dyslexia or poor eyesight, perhaps), or something that simply doesn’t “click” visually for the reader. If looking at the page is causing problems, then just don’t look.
    • Ability to take a step back from the page, literally and figuratively, which encourages greater connection with collaborators and audiences.

    If you are already practicing in a thorough and deliberate way, you are probably well on your way to memorization already without any extra effort. Use good practice techniques and memorization together to support better preparation and performance.

  • Slowing down

    ByBret Pimentel

    I can’t tell you how often I have had this happen in lessons, especially with my younger students:

    Me: Play your E-flat major scale.

    Student: [Begins scale at breakneck speed, plays 3-4 notes, makes a mistake, stops. Begins again at the same speed, makes a different mistake, stops.]

    Me: Wait—

    Student: [Begins again at breakneck speed, makes a different mistake, stops.]

    Me: Wait. Please slow down and play accurately.

    Student: [Begins again at same speed as before, makes a different mistake, stops.]

    Me: Okay, let me show you what I mean. [Demonstrates.]

    Student: [Rolls eyes. Plays the scale slowly, with much-improved accuracy.]

    Me: Good. See what I—

    Student: [Plays at breakneck speed. Makes a mistake.]

    Younger or less-experienced students in particular seem to get fixated on a perceived need to play everything as fast as possible, and often seem to prefer fast-with-mistakes over slower and more accurate. But as more experienced practice-ers know, time spent practicing this way is virtually 100% wasted.

    Mastery of a technical sequence, such as playing a scale or musical passage, requires repetition. If my scale turns out differently every time because I’m playing too fast and sacrificing consistency, then I really haven’t done any repetitions. Or if I’m making the same mistake repeatedly because I’m not giving myself time to think while I play, then I’m doing repetitions of something that I didn’t want to master: an incorrect version of the passage. I spent many of my younger years throwing away practice time doing each of those things.

    It’s also a mistake to move on too quickly from playing slowly. Sometimes I will see a student make several hasty, sloppy attempts at a passage, then relent and play it slowly, and then, having “succeeded,” immediately return to playing too fast. Once isn’t nearly enough. It may take several, or dozens, or hundreds, or more accurate, controlled repetitions before it’s possible to play the passage at the desired speed. But if I have laid this foundation well, I find that speed is the least of my worries—I have all the speed I need, and with solid accuracy.

    And the speeding-up part of the process often takes place very late in my preparations. I think sometimes my students expect their speed to increase like this:

    speed-straightBut I get much better results if I allow this to happen:

    speed-curved

    I spend more and more of my time polishing every detail of a passage at a slow tempo, and let the speeding up happen later and later. When I do this, I learn technical sequences much more thoroughly and much more efficiently (in other words, the “Time spent practicing” for a particular passage gets shorter and produces better results).

    Don’t waste time and effort practicing mistakes. Be patient, slow down, play it with accuracy and control.

  • More on airline travel with musical instruments

    ByBret Pimentel

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    I think it’s also worth sharing the musical instrument policies of a few of the major (US) airlines:

    Travel safely.

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